Thanks for bringing this up. I think a few different things are getting mixed together here, and your reply made me realize some parts of the idea need more explanation.
For me, everything starts with one question: do we want wearables to accrue collectible value over time?
If your main interest is smart wearables as portable functionality across scenes and Worlds, I understand where you’re coming from. You want to build something useful, carry it around, and use it across Decentraland. Scarcity is much less important for that use case, and smart wearables may eventually deserve separate treatment.
What I’m trying to bring back is another part of NFTs that Decentraland has almost completely lost: desirability through scarcity.
Years ago people hunted rare wearables on OpenSea, placed bids, searched for forgotten pieces, compared mint numbers and genuinely enjoyed collecting. That culture is basically gone.
Now add AI and increasingly easy creation. If I can create my own wearable and publish it for $25, why would I buy yours? As creation gets easier, that becomes an increasingly obvious problem. Eventually the secondary market loses much of its purpose.
Your concern about future creators is valid though: if new collections are capped, where does someone who doesn’t already own one get a collection?
I think the short-term answer could be an initial liquidity pool. Before the cap takes effect, perhaps another 100 or 1,000 collections are made available specifically to prevent an immediate crunch while the market adjusts.
At the same time, there are already huge numbers of existing collections that nobody currently wants to buy. Once people realize those collections can potentially be sold to another creator who wants to take them over, repurpose them and build something better, they suddenly have value.
That creates liquidity.
And by the time genuine scarcity starts appearing, you may already own several collections yourself. At that point I suspect you’ll actually be happy that somebody else cannot simply create another thousand collections for almost nothing. You have something scarce that you’ve spent time improving and building around.
It could also change creator behavior in a healthy way. Instead of constantly abandoning old work and creating another collection, there is an incentive to improve what you already have.
The biggest implementation question I see is what happens to already minted wearables.
Imagine a collection is 50% minted, or even completely minted, and its owner decides to sell the collection. What exactly does the new owner get?
Obviously we need to be extremely careful about somebody buying a collection and suddenly changing what existing NFT holders already own. Maybe existing mints remain permanently untouched and only the unused supply can be repurposed. In that case, the amount of remaining mintable supply itself becomes part of the collection’s value.
Or there may be a much more interesting solution where collection history, previous designs, mint numbers, remaining supply, redesigns and ownership changes become attributes people actually collect around.
People love this stuff. Mint #1 versus mint #50, an original version versus a later iteration, a collection with 90% unused capacity versus one with 5%. Those differences can create entire layers of market behavior and value.
The technical limitation around changing things like a published collection’s name also needs a solution. Maybe that requires replacing or migrating something while preserving the finite total. That’s an engineering question.
So I don’t think the issue is simply “will people still be able to create?” They absolutely should.
The deeper question is:
Do we want Decentraland NFTs to become scarce, collectible and desirable assets again, or primarily a cheap mechanism for publishing wearable functionality?
I think both use cases have value. I also think we’ve spent years making creation easier while almost completely losing the collectible side.
That’s the part I’m trying to bring back.
